Nicholas Lototsky
A single flight changed everything. Nicholas Lototsky was seven or eight years old when a family friend, a pilot, took him up as a passenger. “All my LEGOs turned towards building LEGO airplanes,” he recalls. That early spark never dimmed. More than a decade later, Lototsky is graduating from USC Viterbi‘s Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering with a record that reflects just how much he packed into four years at Viterbi.
Growing up in Long Beach, Lototsky comes from several generations of mathematicians; both parents are math professors. But it was the applied world of flight, not pure theory, that captured his imagination. The bridge between their worlds, he says, is physics: the common curriculum that underlies both mathematics and engineering. “The fundamentals we all understand,” he says. Beyond that, the fields diverge quickly. “If they were to discuss their work with me, I wouldn’t understand it. Same thing with engineering.” It is a warm dynamic, close enough to speak the same language, different enough that each has something to learn from the other.
When he arrived at USC, he hit the ground running. As a freshman, he joined both the Rocket Propulsion Lab (RPL) and the AeroDesign Team (ADT), and it was on ADT that he found an unexpected calling: flying the aircraft. The team was transitioning away from having a faculty advisor serve as pilot, and Lototsky, who had logged hours flying remote-control planes in high school, stepped up. “Here I am, a freshman,” he says, “responsible for flying the airplane,” one that topped 110 miles per hour, far beyond anything he had flown before. He describes it as equal parts terrifying and exhilarating, and the kind of responsibility that shaped him as an engineer.
Engineering Answers to Life-or-Death Questions
That same combination of real-world passion and analytical curiosity drove his most celebrated research. Lototsky had earned his pilot’s license in high school during COVID, when flight schools were deemed essential businesses, a designation he still finds amusing. Long before USC, he had been bothered by a nagging question: what happens when your engine fails right after takeoff?
Pilots are trained on rules of thumb: below 300 feet, land straight ahead; between 300 and 700 feet, you can turn a little and find a field; above 700 feet, you can turn back to the airport. “These numbers are very arbitrary,” he says. “It felt weird having your life depend on just arbitrary numbers like that.” In his junior year, he decided to take an engineering approach, building a Python simulation to model the maneuver and validating it with flight simulator data. The result was a research paper that won him the AIAA Region VI Best Individual Paper Award and an invitation to present at AIAA SciTech, where his work was published and briefed to industry and FAA representatives.
This spring, Lototsky added a second AIAA distinction, the Region VI Best Team Paper Award, for his senior design project: an autonomous parafoil system designed to steer payloads from rockets or weather balloons to a precise landing point, rather than leaving them at the mercy of the wind. The team demonstrated the concept by dropping a one-pound prototype from a drone and validating its guidance algorithm. It is the kind of hands-on, mission-driven work that defines his time at Viterbi.
Building Something That Outlasts You
Perhaps his most lasting contribution to USC is one he helped build from scratch. In his junior year, Lototsky became a founding member of the Human-Powered Flight Research Team (HPFRT), drawn by the idea of placing a person at the center of an aerospace design challenge, something rare in student projects. Human-powered aircraft must be simultaneously ultra-light and enormous, demanding a level of systems-level thinking that forces teams to work in close collaboration. The aircraft flies at just 15 miles per hour, only 10 feet above the ground, but the engineering complexity is anything but simple. As he graduates, the team continues under new student leadership. “It’s fulfilling,” he says, with characteristic understatement.
Lototsky also served for multiple semesters as a course producer across several AME classes, mentoring and even writing homework problems. Grading, he says, deepened his own understanding: “When you see mistakes other people make and you have to catch them, it really makes you learn the material very well.”
He also credits AME341, Viterbi’s demanding mechoptronics course, as a quiet foundation for his research success. The class is notorious for its workload, but what it instilled was the ability to write a rigorous technical report. “I can only credit my first-place finishes with my research papers to that class,” he says. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t have been able to do it.” His dedication to his coursework, and to every project he has taken on, reflects a young engineer who finds genuine joy in the work itself. “If my entire weekend is spent doing some menial tasks to build an airplane,” he says, “I still consider that a fulfilling weekend.”
Outside of his coursework and research, Lototsky’s hobbies reveal a personality that is hard to fully separate from aviation. He spends time on flight simulators. “I take it too seriously to call it playing,” he admits, logging virtual flights on weekends much as he did as a kid. And then there is the piano, which he has studied for years and pursued formally enough at USC to nearly complete a piano minor. It is perhaps the one part of his life that has nothing to do with airplanes, and he intends to keep it that way.
Michigan Bound, With Much Still to Learn
This fall, Lototsky heads to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor to begin a PhD in aerospace engineering, focusing on uncertainty quantification, a research area with applications ranging from aircraft design to next-generation propulsion.
His reason for pursuing a doctorate is refreshingly self-aware: “When you go through four years of undergrad, you take a lot of introductory courses, and you realize how much you actually don’t know, and how much more there is to learn.” He wants to go deeper, building the kind of first-principles theoretical foundation that industry rarely offers time for. A PhD, he says, is the right environment for that.
Fittingly, Ann Arbor is familiar territory: his grandparents lived nearby for years, and he spent many summers there. His younger brother Paul, a junior at USC also studying aerospace engineering, will carry on the family’s Trojan legacy.
Nicholas Lototsky leaves Viterbi the same way he arrived: with curiosity, drive, and his eyes on the sky. Flight On.
Published on April 28th, 2026
Last updated on April 28th, 2026